Looking Back on a Journey

Let us begin by considering how Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) made a way for himself in France between about 1855 and 1909. As for the posthumous international development of research into his music, that will be the focus of the latter part of this text. Fauré’s long life gives one pause. One might describe it as a slow but constant and courageous ascent. Really, nothing destined this boy from Ariège, deep in the south of France, to become one of the glorious figures of the French Republic – the Republic that would one day confer on this modest man the extraordinary honor of a national funeral, like that of Victor Hugo. We remark that since he was intended from childhood to become a church musician, he did not follow the educational path taken by the majority of French musicians and attend the Paris Conservatory, an institution founded by the National Convention in 1795. He was only nine years old when he was enrolled instead in the excellent École de musique classique et religieuse that had just been founded by Louis Niedermeyer, and he would study there from 1854 to 1865. At the École, a capital encounter took place: he met Camille Saint-Saëns, his teacher and soon his friend, who took over piano instruction after Niedermeyer’s death in 1861. Fauré’s beginnings as an organist were rather modest. He languished in the loft of the Church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes (1865–69); on returning to Paris, he became organist at Notre-Dame de Clignancourt (1870) and then at the swank parish of Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau (1871). After the war he played the choir organ at Saint-Sulpice, a post he passed along to his friend André Messager when he had to replace Saint-Saëns at La Madeleine during the older composer’s tours. His professional life stabilized in 1877 when he became choirmaster of the same church, a post that put him in the public eye. Saint-Saëns was then principal organist at La Madeleine, an even more prominent position, which he yielded to his former student in 1896. Fauré was more than fifty years old when he